Extinction

by J. T. Brannan

That was how he’d thought of it – ‘redirection’. It was much better than the arguably more accurate term of ‘sabotage’. But the result was the same: certain key security cameras had been turned to face in different directions, other sensors had been fed inaccurate data, and an ‘escape corridor’, unobserved by the base’s hi-tech surveillance, had been left open for their trip to view the Northern Lights.

  Jack was in charge of all of the base’s computer operating systems. He wasn’t attached to the security section of the command centre, but because he had designed the software that the section used, he could control the base’s electronic surveillance capabilities. He could shut down the entire system and replace it with a useless ‘mock’ system, and the security section would be none the wiser. Not that this had been his plan tonight; his intention tonight had been much more modest. And the redirection had worked. The two of them had managed to get up on the roof and back to Jack’s room completely unchallenged. Jack told her he would switch the system back to normal in the morning, which meant that it was still streaming incorrect information through to the security centre. Alyssa hoped that this meant she would get to the computer centre undiscovered.

  She retraced her steps from earlier, using Jack’s access card to pass through doors, always alert for other people, and finally entered the main command centre instead of climbing up the side of it.

  Despite the lights which still shone brightly from the mobile command centres over on the radar field, this building was mercifully empty, as she’d hoped it would be at three in the morning. She quickly found the signs for the computer centre, and had to hide only once as a security guard made his rounds. She made a mental note of the time, hoping that he wouldn’t be back for at least an hour.

  Eventually, she reached the computer centre, a room of glass-enclosed cubicles separated from the rest of the building by a huge smoked-glass wall. She used Jack’s access card again, and a glass door slid open to admit her.

  She searched the cubicles until she found Jack’s – helpfully, all the desks had nameplates – and sat down, hunching over in the seat to minimize her shape, should any more security guards come round and peer through the glass. The desk was cluttered with work but empty of personal effects. There were no family pictures, nothing of any noticeable sentimental nature. The only thing that indicated a real person worked there at all was a canvas print hanging to one side. It was of a train crashing though the foyer wall of a station. She recognized it instantly as the main railway station of her home town. She wondered briefly if Jack used to live there too, or if he just thought it was an interesting picture.

  She used the key card to turn on the computer, praying that the light from the screen wouldn’t alert anyone.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Anderson asked the chief analyst. The security command centre was hidden underground, along with many of the research elements surrounding Spectrum Nine. The place was a hive of activity after the successful test earlier, but nobody else working on the base would ever realize.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ came the reply. ‘She’s not there. Alyssa Durham isn’t at her apartment, and she hasn’t been seen at work since yesterday morning. It was hard getting information, but from what we can gather, she’s gone away somewhere for a work assignment, although we haven’t yet found out exactly what she’s working on. Her editor, James Rushton, wouldn’t give us anything. Her bags were gone from her apartment but we can’t find plane tickets or any other type of ticket booked in her name.’

  Anderson considered the matter, and could feel his blood pressure rising. After such a glorious evening, with the full might of Spectrum Nine finally being utilized, here was the bad news. Alyssa Durham was still out there somewhere.

  Perhaps she had just been spooked and run off somewhere. Understandable, considering he’d been trying to kill her. And yet from her performance in the park, and the information on her file, she didn’t seem the type of woman to run away from anything. On the contrary, she seemed the kind of person who would just as soon attack.

  He spun round to address the analyst. ‘Do we have a home number for Elizabeth Gatsby?’ he asked.

  The analyst called up some data on his screen, and read it off to Anderson, who typed it into his phone and connected the call.

  He held the phone to his ear and waited, hearing it ring and ring. No answer. He hung up. ‘What time is it there?’ he asked next.

  ‘Er . . . eight in the morning?’ the analyst suggested.

  ‘Maybe she’s already on her way to school,’ Anderson muttered to himself. He asked for the school’s telephone number and was put through straight away.

  ‘Hello, I was wondering if Mrs Elizabeth Gatsby is expected in at work this morning?’ he asked politely.

  He listened as the receptionist on the other end of the line went to check her records. ‘Yes, she’s due in today. In fact, I can just see her pulling up outside now. Do you want to hold for her? Who shall I say is calling?’

  But Anderson had already hung up and was racing towards the elevator that would take him from the control room to the dormitory block and Room E14.

  10

  ALYSSA DIDN’T KNOW exactly what she was looking for. How did you go about finding a ‘black’ research project, something that wasn’t ever supposed to be found?

  But Jack had said that he had access to the base’s security mainframe, and she was therefore confident that she would find something. She trawled security logs, staff records, maintenance requests; anything and everything. And then she stumbled upon some transcripts.

  These were written records of conversations between certain base personnel – telephone calls, emails, even chats in the rest room, it was all there. Obviously anyone suspected of leaking intelligence was closely watched.

  There wasn’t anything that shouted at her, but she noticed continual references to S-9, Spectrum Nine, and something known mysteriously as the ninth spectrum.

  With these key words, she inserted a search program into the system and set it running. Further security clearance was needed, but when she flashed Jack’s card across the infrared reader, access was instantly granted.

  Vast swathes of information came up, and it wasn’t long before she found what she was looking for – technical schematics for a project known as Spectrum Nine, presumably the secret project that many people believed lay behind the HIRP base.

  She quickly inserted a flash drive that she was carrying and started the download. Clicking off the page as the system laboriously downloaded the schematics to her portable memory stick, she began to go through the rest of the pages. The technical info should tell her what Spectrum Nine was, and what it was capable of, but she wanted names too, to find the people who were behind the project. Was it legitimate? And if so, who was authorizing it? Who—

  ‘Would you mind telling me just what the hell you think you’re doing?’

  With a start, Alyssa looked up from her computer, to see Jack standing in the doorway.

  Anderson knocked loudly on the door and when it wasn’t answered within five seconds he drew his handgun and kicked it down, bursting into the room with his weapon up and aimed.

  Nothing. She wasn’t there. She, the woman who was impersonating Elizabeth Gatsby; the same woman who had evaded assassination and then capture at the amusement park. Alyssa Durham.

  He raced from the room, thinking he had one last chance before he had to sound the general alarm. Across the hallway he came to Jack’s room. Again he knocked, waited five seconds, and then kicked it down, handgun scanning the space beyond.

  Empty.

  Damn it! How could he have been so stupid? It was no coincidence that Jack had met her at the bar; they were obviously in on it together, which meant only one thing.

  They would both have to die.

  It took no more than a minute for Alyssa to tell Jack everything; her real name, what she did for a living, how she had seen Karl Janklow assassinated right next to her, which had set in motion all her subseque
nt actions.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ she said, hoping with all her heart that he believed her.

  ‘And me?’ he asked.

  ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘please believe me, I never wanted to involve anyone else. What we did . . . I really wanted to. But I also needed information. I saw your card there, I remembered what you said about having security access, I saw my chance and I took it. I’m sorry,’ she said again.

  Jack stared at her silently, his expression unreadable.

  ‘If what you’ve told me is true,’ he said finally, collapsing into a chair opposite her, ‘then I guess I—’

  He was cut off by the shrill, ear-shattering blare of a warning klaxon.

  The alarm had been sounded.

  The security guard doing the rounds of the main command centre received the message over his intercom just as the alarm started.

  Colonel Anderson was ordering all available security personnel to make a hard search of the base for two targets. Jack Murray was HIRP’s chief computer technician, and the guard knew him well enough; Alyssa Durham/Elizabeth Gatsby was an unknown entity, but her description was sent over even as the guard pulled his pistol from its holster and made his way down the corridor.

  Anderson’s orders were clear: the targets were to be shot on sight.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ Alyssa shouted at Jack over the sound of the siren, clicking frantically with the computer mouse, downloading any page she came across.

  ‘We?’ Jack asked. ‘Why have I got to go anywhere? I haven’t done anything!’

  That was true enough, Alyssa thought. ‘Then I’ve got to get out of here. Is there another way out of this room?’

  ‘After what you’ve done? Why should I—’

  The glass wall shattered behind them, a high-powered handgun round blasting through Jack’s computer monitor.

  Alyssa instinctively dropped down behind the cubicle, noticing that Jack did the same.

  ‘Why the hell are they shooting at me?’ Jack shouted across to her.

  ‘They think you’re helping me!’ Alyssa shouted back, grabbing the flash drive from the computer and stuffing it into an inside pocket. She risked a glance over the desk but whipped her head straight back down as she saw the guard level his pistol at her. The next bullet tore across the room, destroying the next cubicle, showering her and Jack with glass shards.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ Jack spat. ‘I guess I’ll have to help now!’

  Alyssa managed a grateful smile as Jack pointed back towards the rear wall, ushering her towards it. Another way out? She really hoped so, knowing the guard would be upon them at any moment.

  On her hands and knees, she started to crawl across the broken glass.

  The guard snaked his way through the cubicles, angry that he’d missed that first shot. But when he’d seen the two of them sitting across from one another, he’d just raised his pistol and fired.

  It was the smoked glass wall which had thrown his aim off, deflecting the path of his bullet just enough for it to miss Jack. And now they knew he was there, which would only make things harder.

  Still, he figured, they would be panicked, scared and, most importantly, unarmed. What was more, they had nowhere to run. Reinforcements were already on their way, but if he played this right, all that would be left for Anderson and his men would be bodies.

  Broken glass crunched under his feet as he turned past one more cubicle, his gun aimed down at the ground. But there was nothing there, just bloodstained shards of glass.

  They must have crawled off, he realized, cutting their hands and knees as they went. Well, it didn’t matter; they were only prolonging the inevitable.

  ‘Son of a bitch!’ Jack whispered, pain shooting through his hands and knees as they continued crawling.

  They had made it undetected to the storage cupboard on the far side of the room. Jack had ushered Alyssa inside and then pulled out a rear panel to reveal a duct for electric cabling. It was small, but there was enough room to crawl in. Once inside, Jack had reattached the panel and gestured for Alyssa to keep moving forward.

  Jack’s curse drew Alyssa’s attention to her own cuts. The pain made pulling herself through the cramped service space decidedly unpleasant. But it was infinitely preferable to being shot at, and so she just gritted her teeth and ploughed on. She hoped the security guard wouldn’t be able to follow the trail of blood.

  The cabling duct angled off in two directions, and behind her she felt Jack tap her right ankle. She veered off right, wondering why Jack knew so much about the ducts. Maybe she would ask him sometime, if they managed to survive the night.

  ‘So where are they?’ Anderson’s voice boomed across the computer room.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know, sir,’ the security guard stammered, unable to understand how the pair could have got away.

  Anderson spent just seconds scanning the scene before he saw the spots of blood. There was quite a bit to start with, but then it petered out. He could see why the guard had failed to spot it, but Anderson was a whole different animal; to him, it was as plain as day.

  He followed the trail to the cupboard and wrenched open the door. He was disappointed but not overly surprised to find it empty.

  He saw the panel at the back instants later, observing how it hung at a very slight angle, as if someone had unsuccessfully tried pulling it back into place from the other side.

  He reached forward and pulled it away, leaning through with his gun into the small, dark space. ‘Where does this go?’ he demanded.

  When nobody answered him, he keyed his radio, contacting the chief analyst back in the underground chamber. ‘The cabling ducts from the computer room,’ he said without preamble. ‘Where do they lead?’

  There was a pause, the man obviously calling up the building blueprints on his computer. ‘They terminate in an external access point, halfway down the building’s north side, about five metres from the rear access doors.’

  Anderson keyed the radio once more and directed his men to converge on the access hatch.

  Alyssa and Jack were already in the shadows of a copse of trees fifty yards away from the command centre when a whole squad of soldiers descended on the access hatch they had left only minutes earlier.

  ‘Well, we’re out,’ Jack breathed. ‘But now what? The whole base is surrounded by a twelve-foot perimeter fence. If we get past that, we’re still in the middle of nowhere.’

  Alyssa tried hard to still her hammering heartbeat. Jack was right; they’d escaped the building and the immediate danger, but now what? They had to get out of the base somehow. She sank to her knees, thinking. There had to be a way; there always was.

  Suddenly, kneeling there bleeding on to the crisp, fresh snow, she had a memory flash. HIRP Community Newsletter number 324, second page. Karl’s notice about the Adventure Club.

  ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘where’s the glider hangar?’

  ‘So do you know how to fly one of these things?’ Jack asked her as they stared at the sleek silver glider inside the large metal hangar they’d just broken into.

  The hangar was not far beyond the trees; luckily, the search hadn’t extended this far yet. They’d seen two soldiers pass by, but used the cover of the trees to avoid them. The hangar was barely protected at all; theft probably wasn’t a big problem around here.

  ‘No,’ she answered simply.

  ‘Well, what a superb idea!’ Jack shot back. ‘So what do we do with it now?’

  Alyssa stared at it for some time, and the specially rigged tractor next to it. ‘It’s not a fighter plane, Jack,’ she said, approaching it, figuring out how it might work. ‘I mean, how hard can it be?’

  ‘They’re what?’ Anderson exploded, already running towards the hangar.

  The reply came back exactly the same as before: nearby security personnel had seen a tractor burst out of the hangar, dragging the glider behind it. What the hell were they thinking?

  ‘Open fire!’ Anderson commanded, and w
as gratified to hear the sound of automatic rifle shots just moments later.

  This probably wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had, Alyssa admitted to herself as she drove the high-speed tractor towards the northern perimeter, pulling the lightweight glider behind her, a terrified Jack at the controls. But all he had to do was hold it straight; she was going to have to do the real work.

  Jack had told her that just a few hundred metres ahead, the northern edge of the base fell away down a sheer cliff face to the forest below; it was unclimbable, by all accounts, so much so that Anderson didn’t even post security patrols there. But it offered everything she needed, and she accelerated towards it with every horsepower the tractor could muster.

  She heard the sound of gunshots then, and felt the impact of rounds hitting the vehicle. She hoped the thin skin of the glider wouldn’t be damaged, but there was nothing she could do about that now. And then suddenly they were there, at the edge of the cliff.

  As the tractor started to tilt over the edge, she was seized by a feeling of absolute horror, a sensation of deep-seated, all-encompassing dread that chilled her to the bone. The view out across the moonlit, rocky terrain, the snow-covered landscape, the feel of the chill wind on her face – for several terrifying, panic-inducing seconds, she was back on the chair lift cable watching her eight-year-old daughter plunge helplessly to her death.

  ‘Jump!’ she heard Jack yell. ‘Alyssa, jump!’

  She snapped back to reality and started scrambling back through the tractor even as it fell from the top of the cliff, its weight pulling it inexorably downwards. With a last surge, she came out from the rear of the tractor, unhooked the towline from its attachment in one smooth movement and grabbed hold of the cable with both hands, gripping on for dear life as the tractor plummeted to the valley floor below. Momentum pulled the glider forward off the cliff until it soared out across the open sky, with Alyssa dangling beneath, swaying in the wind.

  Anderson watched the glider as it pitched and yawed across the sky and emptied his magazine after it, ignoring the futility of such an action.